tiny holes

friday evening, just after work m and i meet a friend for a quick drink. on way home we decide to rent a movie and stop by our video store. inside the store, playing on ceiling-mounted television screen is a film i love, but one i haven't seen in probably a decade. it features casual displays of wanton interpersonal cruelty and one key scene displaying such plays as we are waiting in the check-out line. i am transfixed and something inside me is breaking open. moments later we are in the car driving home and i am weeping. then we are home and i am momentarily wracked with sobs. the next morning the film - and the images i re/saw standing in line and my reaction - are the first thing that find me when i wake up. it is a strange sensation, one i don't know that i've ever had, some admixture of past, present, future - involving the way i was raised, that moment standing in line, the way i related to that film 15 yrs prior; something to do with promises the old me made to the future me (which is to say promises the 20-year-old-child made to the 38-year-old-child) and the latter's assesment of progress; something about the interconnected thread of humanity between everyone and the immunizations i've allowed to obscure it. There are also supplementary tangents of film and filmmaking, art and life, life and death.

The experience was at once remembrance and awakening, governed by a chain of random events, causing tiny disparate holes to line up for one fleeting set of seconds and allow the full weight of some heretofore unknown arrow penetrate my heart. suffice to say it was something more profound than can be addressed intellectually in these lines but it was either one of those fleeting moments in life where for one split-second you arrive at crystalline-clarity and then reality washes back in like the tide or it was something else. something new.